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Archive for September, 2004

I had my first taste of international cinema last week when I went to see a few films at the Asian Film Festival at the NFAI. (Free passes thanks to Siddharth :-) ) Having read a lot about Irani cinema, I really wanted to see one. So, I was pretty happy because I got a chance to see two Irani films ‘Color of Paradise’ and ‘Children of Heaven’ and a film from Afghanistan called ‘Osama’. I wasn’t keen on watching ‘Osama’ but was forced to do so by Siddharth. Thankfully, the film turned out to be awesome. It made me thank his stars that I live in urban India. The film is about a girl who has to disguise as a boy in order to earn a living, under the Taliban rule. Even though I had some inkling about the appalling living conditions in Afghanistan under Taliban, watching them on film is quite shocking. Suddenly, George Bush’s talk about giving freedom to oppressed people made some sense. Recommended for everyone.

The two Irani films were a delight to watch. I had expected the films to be slow and ‘arty’. The films were nothing like I expected, they were simple tales told in a very nice manner (somewhat like R.K. Narayan). The films were technically brilliant with some great photography and lighting. The first film ‘Color of Paradise’ was about a blind boy and his world, while the second film ‘Children of Heaven’ was about two siblings living in a poor family who have to manage with a single pair of shoes amongst them. The two lead actors i.e. the kids were very good. Both the films were directed by the same director Majid Majidi. Incidently, his film ‘Baran’ is currently being shown in Inox.

Techstasy is an intercollege event organised by the computer department of VIT. The event is planned and organised by the third year students, so this year the onus was on us. Incidently, the student co-ordinator of the entire event was fellow blogger and friend Salil. The last month was very hectic as a result of this activity. I worked in the commitees for two events: Linux workshop and quiz.

The quiz was a regular affair with the same old crowd which show up at all the college quizes. The quiz went pretty smoothly without any hiccups. The questions were set by Harsh and myself with some inputs from Salil. The Linux workshop and seminar on the other hand faced a few problems. For the Linux thing, we had invited speakers from PLUG. Never having handled college guests, I made quite a few blunders :). My informal attitude with the guests did not go down well with our professor. The PLUG people were pretty cool though and they did this workshop and seminar without charging a single buck! The seminar which was about GNU philosophy and Linux installation was very well received. The workshop which was on programming in Linux, had quite a few newbies who had never sat on a Linux box. They were pretty clueless about the workshop till the end :-(.

The pick among the other events for me was gaming. We had a gaming tournament in AOE, Counter Strike and NFS4. As we had expected, gaming had the maximum rush and maximum fun. The competition for CS was great and we had lot of cursing, abusive language, et all in the labs in front of our profs :-D.

I have been toying with the idea of starting a blog since 3-4 months now. It is just that I haven’t had the time or the inclination to share my ideas/views with the world. This summer many friends like Salil, Kunal, Aaditya, Anand (not his first venture though) entered the blogging world which made me think of doing so. Besides, I have been reading a few blogs quite regularly like Ramanand, Gaurav and other blogs.

This hopefully starts my blogging career.
For those who care:
I am a computer engineering student studying in VIT, Pune.
My hobbies include quizzing, rock music, computer geek-giri and reading.